A new simple adaptive phase tracking scheme employing phase noise estimation for OFDM signals

An adaptive phase tracking scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals can provide superior PER performance in channels that exhibit a variety of phase noise power. It is an effective technique with which to achieve high-rate and high quality wireless transmission. This paper proposes a new simple adaptive phase tracking scheme for OFDM in order to realize high-rate wireless local area networks (LANs). The proposed scheme measures the integrated phase rotation in order to set appropriately the properties of the FIR filter in the phase tracking circuits. This scheme is based on the fact that the integrated phase rotation is correlated to the phase noise power. Assuming an RMS delay spread of 100 ns, computer simulations show that the proposed scheme offers superior required E_b/N₀ performance (versus the phase noise power) compared to the conventional fixed-tap scheme, where the phase-noise-to-signal power ratios are lower than -18 dB. It also offers excellent PER performance at the packet length of 1000 bytes, unlike the conventional schemes which suffer degraded PER performance.